Summit Speaker Releases Report on Security in Afghanistan
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Hallie Ayres
Contributing Writer
This past June, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, released “Divided Responsibility: Lessons Learned From U.S. Security Sector Assistance Efforts in Afghanistan,” a report detailing the progress of U.S. security sector assistance efforts focused on Afghanistan since 2001.
In the report, Sopko outlines the factors that led to massive operational failures in the mission to develop the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Interior. More than 100 current and former government officials and military troops involved in the mission were interviewed for the report. In his introduction, Sopko makes clear that “after 17 years of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and security-related U.S. appropriations totaling $83.3 billion, there is not one person, agency, country, or military service that has had sole responsibility for overseeing security sector assistance. Instead, the responsibility was divided among multiple U.S. and international entities.” This division, Sopko aims to elucidate, compromised the effectiveness of the mission and led to numerous trials and consequences.
Despite the longevity and enormous budget of the operation, Sopko notes that “the United States was unprepared to take on the responsibility of equipping a force at the scale required in Afghanistan.” Throughout the entirety of the mission, no single entity within the U.S. government was assigned responsibility for overseeing efforts to develop the Afghan military, leading to a lack of a standardized approach. Additionally, each NATO country involved in the mission administered their support on their own terms, further exasperating the lack of unity and central management. Within the U.S. team, the military encountered difficulty staffing field advisors due to requirements in terms of rank and speciality, and the predeployment training administered to troops did not contain extensive instruction regarding their specific Afghan context and its “military systems, weapons, doctrine, and history,” as stated in the report.
Beyond these structural issues within U.S. military forces, Sopko argues that the U.S. did not adequately involve Afghan military and political leaders throughout important decision-making processes. Sopko quotes former commander of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger, saying, “Afghans were informed and directed, not asked or consulted.” Consequently, the U.S. has implemented a series of structures and systems that are impossible for Afghani military officers to maintain and replicate without continued U.S. support. While the U.S. government has identified some of the issues plaguing their efforts, for much of the mission, a system of monitoring and providing feedback from deployed troops and Afghani officers did not exist, leaving policy makers and executive officers unable to determine needed changes. Any incremental steps taken to improve U.S. and international involvement have either not been fully realized or have failed to ameliorate the diagnosed issues, Sopko’s report found.
At the close of his report, Sopko outlines a series of recommendations to overhaul the mission and steer it on a more efficient, improved course. Among these suggestions, Sopko advocates for a large-scale, interagency review led by U.S. Central Command, the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to “determine if the United States will continue to engage in [security sector assistance] activities as part of a NATO-led coalition, or if it will transition to a more conventional model led by the U.S. Embassy.” Although Sopko acknowledged the varied expertise that involvement from a range of countries entails, within his report he noted that NATO countries often deploy fewer troops than pledged and place certain caveats, such as geographic limitations, on their troops, resulting in disproportionate burdens placed on other countries.
This review should also determine if the current scale at which the mission operates is necessary or if it should be downsized to involve fewer U.S. security personnel. Along with attending a more extensive and specialized predeployment training, Sopko advises that officers should be required to serve at least a three-year tour with routine deployments into Afghanistan, and the U.S.-led NATO coalition should host quarterly conferences in Kabul for military troops and civilians to mediate conflict and gauge progress of the assistance mission.
John Sopko is the keynote speaker at this year’s Law Enforcement and Government Anti-Fraud Summit in Washington, D.C. Join other industry experts and anti-fraud professionals on November 7, 2019, to learn the latest insights, techniques and tools to address anti-fraud challenges specific to law enforcement and government agencies.